Invisible Learning

Last week the media were gleefully reporting the forthcoming conceptual art show at the Hayward Gallery, entitled ‘Invisible: Art about the unseen 1957 – 2012‘. The exhibition features works that contain content that essentially does not exist, such as an invisible ink drawing, and a police report of a stolen work of invisible sculpture.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/may/18/hayward-gallery-invisible-show

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/blank-canvas-london-gallery-unveils-invisible-art-exhibition-7767057.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/9275545/Invisible-art-exhibition-to-set-imaginations-alight.html

So, what else could All Change Please! do but to proudly curate its own imaginary show mischievously entitled: ‘Invisible Learning: A nostalgic look at the current state of formal education and the unseen absence of learning 1950s to 2012′.

The first work that greets the visitor to Invisible Learning – a triptych – convincingly illustrates the concept of obliterated learning. It begins with a blackboard with the chalk erased with a blackboard duster, effectively turning it into a whiteboard. Adjacent is another piece in which an electronic whiteboard is completely covered in black marker pen, effectively turning it into a blackboard. This is followed by the iconoclastic ‘Essay obliterated by red ink‘.

On display at the Hayward is Tom Friedman’s ‘1000 hours of staring‘ – a blank piece of paper the artist stared at for five years. In response, Invisible Learning presents us with a blank OCR Multiple Choice Question answer sheet which a pupil has spent five years staring at. This is followed by a reference to Yoko Ono’s set of instructions telling viewers to imagine they are looking at a work of art, presented in the form of the current National Curriculum documents and exam specifications telling teachers what their students should imagine they are learning.

While the Hayward exhibition contains ‘Invisible sculpture‘ – a plinth that Andy Warhol once briefly stood on, the next section of Invisible Learning includes a series of items of educational technologies that were once used briefly by famous people while at school.

So here is Bill Gates’ actual BBC micro that he first learnt to program on, the slide projector used to show art-history film-strips to the young David Hockney, and a piece of chalk originally thrown at Richard Branson when he wasn’t paying attention in a lesson.

Meanwhile, instead of Jeppe Heine’s ‘Invisible Labyrinth‘ on show at the Hayward – an invisible maze though which visitors ‘negotiate their way through a maze wearing digital headphones activated by infra-red beams’,  Invisible Learning visitors will experience the ‘Labyrinth of Learning‘ in which they negotiate their way through a maze of irrelevant subjects and examinations activated by the current government.

Based on John Cage’s famous 4′ 33″ ‘silent music’ piece, the Invisible Learning exhibition continues with 35’00″ of ‘silent reading’, in which a bell is rung to denote the beginning and end of the piece.

Then, in contrast to Yves Klein’s 1961 ‘In the Void Room‘ which featured an immersive walk-in installation painted entirely white and lit by a series of neon lamps, Invisible Learning is proud to present a special immersive gallery in which visitors can wander through empty learning spaces and corridors.

In this disturbing space a single chair is provided for visitors to sit and recall the endless sense of isolation experienced day after day sitting in the classroom.

And in this special installation two lone teachers still drone on endlessly, even though their classes went home years ago.

The final work in this section contains another sculptural piece, provocatively entitled ‘Chairs on tables‘, ritualistically created in every learning space across the country at the end of every school day. One is forced to wonder in what aspects of later life this creative learning experience will prove invaluable.

The last gallery contains perhaps the most evocative work. At the Hayward, Teresa Margolles takes water that has been used to wash the bodies of murder victims in Mexico City’s morgue and uses it in a humidifier: ‘Visitors walk through a room just aware of this superfine mist and its relationship to people mainly killed by drug cartels…You feel it on your skin.”

In Invisible Learning, odours extracted from deserted school sports halls, cloakrooms, assembly halls and chemistry labs are similarly used in a series of humidifiers that create a superfine nauseous mist for visitors to walk through and become more intimately aware of the learning victims of formal educational institutions and teacher cartels.

Just as the Hayward exhibition prompts one to ask: ‘But is it Art?‘, so Invisible Learning forces us to question the current provision of formal schooling: `But is it Education?’

And while one-off entry to the Hayward Exhibition costs just £8, a season pass to the entire Invisible Learning experience costs up to £9,000 a year.

Meanwhile, to read an invisible article about Invisible Art, click on the invisible link below:

http:// www.                               .html

Photo credits: Flickr Commons: Pareeerica, Jeremy Gordon, Steve Berry, Stuart Pillbrow, Emily Bean, Naraoekim0801, gish700, Calm Drew, Shaylor, True British Metal.

21st Century Schizoid Learning

I first encountered the world of education (as a prospective teacher as opposed to a student) some 37 years ago, in 1975, which by chance marked the dawn of the final quarter of the 20th century. It was a time when design and processed-based education was being pioneered. The phrase ‘throw-away society’ had already be coined, and we all knew about the hidden persuasive power of the media and advertising. And because of the oil crisis in the early 1970s there was much talk of the need for conservation and alternative energy, and public collaboration and for greater participation in new design processes. Quite clearly the end was in sight for the then current approach to the industrial society, mass-production and established design-by-drawing methodologies. By the end of the 1970s the impending impact of the computer on our lives was becoming evident too.

So when I come across the phrases ‘21st Century Learning‘ and ‘21st Century Skills‘, I can’t help thinking that what is actually being discussed is ‘late 20th Century Learning and Skills‘. The need for critical evaluation and problem-solving, creativity and innovation, communication and collaboration was clearly identified way back in the last century, but it has taken 37 years for them to start to become more widely identified and accepted (except of course by the present UK government).

Let’s project forward another 37 years then, to 2049. What are the educational needs of someone actually born in the 21st Century? The oldest will be turning 12 this year, and by 2049 will be 49. But unlike the 1960s and 70s when the next 25 years seemed relatively easy to anticipate, there’s now little indication as to how things will be in the future. The only prediction we can perhaps make, based on the fact that technology has clearly entered a highly disruptive phase, is that the next quarter of a century is completely unpredictable.

Thus the so-called ’21st Century Learning and Skills’ might well be hopelessly out-dated and inadequate to deal with living and working in the later years of this century. I suspect (and hope) they will still have some value, but who knows what things will actually be like in the brave new world our current generation of school-children will find themselves?

Perhaps the most important thing we should be focusing on is to ensure the inhabitants of tomorrow’s world are as flexible as possible in their thoughts and actions, well prepared for and accepting of discontinuous change as something normal, and more than willing to take risks and deal with failure. But surely the most important thing of all is to ensure that 21st Century children gain a positive view of education, and the ability to be able to learn for themselves in whatever future they encounter? Sadly, at present, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Image credit: Photo-Extremist: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thevlue/4839060646

Living in the past?

Well, little did I suspect that last week’s ‘A brief history of dates‘ would be the post that would generate the most number of views – some three hundred – since ‘Thunderbirds are Gove’. All I ever wanted to do was to point out that history involves a great deal more than memorising dates, and that some students found writing academic essays inappropriate to their needs and abilities.

From the tweets and comments, it seems to have stirred up considerable resentment from a number of seemingly distraught, distressed, enraged and hysterical history teachers. On Twitter I’ve been labelled as ‘fashionably-minded’, accused of suggesting that history shouldn’t involve any factual knowledge at all, of not listening to points I didn’t want to hear, and that I wished to exclude teaching students how to write essay-style blogs (even if they wanted to). It’s also been suggested that I doubtless wouldn’t approve someone’s comment (I’ve approved everybody’s comments without exception). Oh, and apparently it seems I’m a ‘moron’ – a particularly clever and witty ripost for an academic, I thought.

And reading through some of the comments one could be forgiven for thinking that I had suggested that no-one ever needed to know anything ever again as it’s all on the internet, and that children should never be expected to write a coherent passage of text.

I must say I found the reference to the Ed Hirsch Jr., Spring 2000 paper ‘You can always look it up…or Can you?‘ interesting, particularly as it appears to have become the bible of the ‘knowledge recall comes first’ disciples, while at the same time not of course taking into account the significant and substantial way in which the whole nature of the internet has developed over the past twelve years. It also perpetuates the misbelief that so-called ‘progressive’ education involves 24/7 process-based learning for everyone, and that all students are best suited to academic learning.

At one level I agree with the proposition that having access to an ever increasing amount of information does indeed probably require a greater amount of pre-knowledge, and an even more general awareness of how the world works. But my purpose was to question the sort of knowledge we need to now have at our finger-tips, and to suggest that memorising detailed facts, such as certain dates, was perhaps becoming less necessary? And the other matter I questioned was not so much what should be taught and assessed, but how it should be taught and assessed. I can’t accept that what was referred to in one of the comments, as ‘direct instruction’ is the only, or the best way for all students to learn, or that formal essay writing is the most effective way for all students to be assessed. Curiously none of the academics chose to discuss those challenges.

Well, I must say I’ve learnt a lot about academically-inclined history teachers. And I can’t say I exactly envy them all having to force-feed all those extra future reluctant  ‘I never wanted to do this subject’ non-academic Bacc teenagers with loads of dates, battles and kings and queens. It’s a tough job, but I guess someone’s got to do it.

And here’s where you can buy the T-shirt! Image credit: Redmolotov.com 

Why I’m feeling none too exciTED

http://tedchris.posterous.com/behind-todays-ted-ed-launch#comment

On Tuesday, there was an announcement from TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) about the launch of TED-Ed, its latest initiative/mission ‘to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world’. Sounds great, but of course in reality it’s all about hosting short video clips of teachers lecturing students. So yet another case of ‘New technology, Old Learning‘. Though, to be fair, at least the TED videos, unlike most of the blackboard-based Khan Academy ones, involve the production of a good quality visual experience that makes the content more accessible, understandable and memorable. And they do at least ask the audience questions and promote curiosity. Which is great if you are following an intellectually academic pathway, but not so helpful if you are a different type of learner.

Now I’ve no objection to this as such, provided of course TEDEd continue to fund high production values and not rely on free second-rate contributions from Sunday afternoon wannabe video directors – but given the vast, incalculable number of ‘facts’ there are these days that they are going to need to cover, that seems somewhat inevitable.

But what really concerns me is the extraordinary enthusiasm with which this (and the Khan Academy) is being greeted by teachers, as if it’s the best thing since the invention of the ‘chalk and talk’ blackboard approach to education, and somehow heralds the start of the great learning revolution we’ve all been waiting for since, er.. the invention of the blackboard. So when we’re informed that:

- Video does indeed have a powerful role to play in education.
- It allows great lessons to be shared online with vastly bigger audiences.
- It allows teachers to show things that would be hard to show live in every class.
- It also can allow kids to learn at their own pace (hello, replay button).
- The best length for a video to be used in class is under 10 minutes.
- The best videos often use animation or other visualization techniques to deliver better explanations and more compelling narratives.

It’s as if back in the 1980s I had never thought to wheel the TV set and VCR into the classroom and showed my students a short video clip or programme that in somewhat enhanced the content of the lesson. At the time we also curated a video library that students were able to access and watch anytime, anyplace. Or that I had not been producing short ‘bite-sized’ audio-visual ‘slide-shows’ delivered over college networks for a FE publisher back in the mid/late 1990s. So what exactly is new?

But the real danger, as I keep going on about in this blog, is that the the process of learning becomes increasingly seen and understood by the public, and promoted by the politicians and media, as being about getting students to sit and passively watch knowledge-based video clips produced for free by enthusiastic teachers, followed by a series of computer-generated and marked multiple choice questions to supposedly assess ‘ability’. This may be more cost-effective, but isn’t education.

Meanwhile here’s what Tony had to say about TEDEd in a recent email…

‘Learning is not (just) ‘sage on the stage’ knowledge transfer. And even if it was, it is not linear (press play sit back and absorb with no interaction or changes in direction), and it is different when you record it as it stops being a living experience. It’s not even the difference between a live performance or a film of the live performance, or a film inspired by the live performance – you had to be there. It’s humming it on the way home and trying to play it and deriving new stuff from it, and painting to it and dancing to it.  It’s a starting point in an active process of doing and creating something of your own, not just a cerebral card collection of other people’s ideas.

And even if you can ignore this unforgivable misunderstanding of the learning process, the really evil thing about it is that it completely denies the existence of the learner as a participant with any contribution or difference or value or purpose of their own. How arrogant. It is the worst form of educational imperialism performed as monologues when at the very least it should be a structured dialogue, and at best an improvisation.’

Oh, and it’s good to know it’s not just Tony and me. Here’s someone else who has some some doubts:

http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.in/2012/03/khan-academy-not-good-pedagogy-and-not.html

Video killed the teaching staff

Where’s the audience gone?

It’s easy to get the idea that the future of education – and indeed the great learning revolution – will come about mainly as the result of students being able to watch a multitude of videos of lectures anytime, anywhere. The argument goes that it’s a pointless waste of money for thousands of professors and lecturers around the world to be delivering the same content when learners could instead watch videos presented by just the very best experts in their field.

I’ve nothing against watching lectures on video, but it concerns me that as a result there’s a good possibility that the number of academic staff retained by learning organisations will come to be drastically cut, at the expense of a quality learning experience for students.

Now why do we go to watch live sports events? Why do we go and see bands and orchestras live? Why do we go to the theatre or the cinema? After all, these are all things that we can easily watch on our TV screens and tablets, anytime, anywhere. But the fact is that the shared, live experience is ultimately far more powerful, enjoyable and memorable.

I recently attended Learning Without Frontiers 12, but was only able to catch a few of the talks, so I’ve been watching the others online. Now the online videos are well worth viewing, but the sessions I really remember – and that had the most impact on me – were the ones I actually saw live. There’s nothing that compares with that personal interaction between the real people who were there – the sense of occasion, the shared consciousness of the audience, and the feeling of direct participation.

It’s the same in the classroom. Good quality teaching and learning involves so much more than the delivery of a series of facts and exercises determined by a stranger standing at the front. It involves a personal interaction – a direct exchange of electro-chemical energy between two or more living beings who have a shared understanding of what makes the others tick.

It may be that as a result of lectures delivered by video, teaching staff are given more contact time with smaller groups of students which extends the quality of that personal interaction, which would of course be great. Or they just might be made redundant as a result of the latest round of public service cost-cutting.

Image credit: BenjaminThompson

The art of anticipation

Today’s futures forecast – major disruption is expected…

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, things didn’t change very much. Tomorrow would be very much like today, which was much the same as yesterday and the day before was. But slowly, ever since around the 1960s, the rate of change has started to speed up a bit. The pace really began to pick up in the 1980s and 1990s, but even then many people believed things would stop changing after a while and go back to normal – and after all computers “are just another tool aren’t they“? But things just kept on changing, and increasingly we started to accept the fact that frequent change was inevitable, albeit in evolutionary, predictable ways that were perhaps not too difficult to cope with. Today, a few brave souls are finally beginning to realise that tomorrow’s changes are becoming increasingly unpredictable, discontinuous and disruptive, and that the reality is that tomorrow is unlikely to be like anything we’ve ever had to deal with before.

Predicting the future is, in itself, not that difficult – science fiction writers have being doing it for years. But what they consistently get wrong is how long it is going to be before their visions become a mainstream reality. 1984 is still on its way. The voyage to Jupiter due to depart in 2001 has been indefinitely postponed. And somehow I don’t think that by November 2019 Los Angeles if going to be full of flying cars, or off-world colony replicants for Harrison Ford to identify and terminate. But one day, I’m sure all these things will come to pass.

Meanwhile this video link appeared the other day. A group of schoolchildren had asked delegates at the LWF12 conference for their views on the future – what it will look like, and what are the skills that will be needed to be successful? Full credit to the school and children involved in making the video – however many of the responses were somewhat predictable – digital literacy, more engaging computer technology,  global communication through utopian technological fixes, or the more dystopian, ‘we’ll all have to save more to survive’. And it may be more honest, but is it acceptable anymore to admit you don’t really know what the future will bring?

Now, given that I’ve had more time than the delegates did to think of clever answers, what struck me was that they were generally speaking providing essentially wild, uninformed guesses, aspirations and fears. Which is worrying really, because, assuming things continue to change discontinuously at an increasingly fast pace, my prediction is that one of the most essential successful survival skills of the 21st century will be the ability to anticipate and predict what’s going to happen next, and even more importantly, when. And that’s something that’s yet to make it onto the curriculum.

Futures forecasting is, of course, by no means new, and there are plenty of well established techniques and methodologies. Essentially there are two main approaches. The first is ‘predictive’, where subjective guesses are made about expected desirable and undesirable outcomes, supported by likely evolutionary time-scales, projections and statements made about the social, economic, technical and political circumstances that will need to be in place for that particular future to occur. The second type is a ‘predictive’ forecast based on detailed and sophisticated data analysis and extrapolation of current market and social, cultural, and economic trends and cycles – and ‘web analytics metrics‘ derived from computer-generated user behaviours is an approach that’s already very big business. A third approach is called ‘scenario writing’, which usually involves a mixture of normative and predictive forecasts.

In our future world the holy grail for our global corporations is to be able to predict what you are going to do or want before you even know it yourself, and then push it at you. And as a result we are going to need to be a lot clearer about what sort of a future we really desire for ourselves and others. More than ever before we are going to need a rich mixture of creative and logical thought and action to be able to survive by knowing how to learn from the past to understand the present and anticipate the future. And a new hybrid approach to the recently denationalised subjects of Design and Technology and Information Technology would be an excellent place to start.

All you need is on-line learning

I was just about to reach out for my one hundred and first mince pie the other day when I caught sight of this article:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/m-a_world_without_schoolteachers.html

“The Kindle and Nook may make for not only the most important advance in reading since Gutenberg, but also, quite likely, a major lesson in unintended consequences.  Especially for the educational establishment, because for the first time in history, Americans should be able to envision a future without public-school teachers — indeed, a future without public-school administrators or state departments of education with their rigidly enforced, politically correct social-transformation curriculum.  A future without onerous school taxes, “education president(s),” self-preening school boards, or million-dollar classrooms.  But most happily, a future without a single supercilious finger wagging in our face as we’re forever lectured about how much a securely tenured, part-time, self-important, overpaid class of public employees “cares” about our sons and daughters.  Really, really, really cares.  And, of course, knows much better than we do how to bring them up.”

Of course, this sort of thing could never happen in the UK (?), but this is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been concerned about. It feeds the public myth that all we need now is on-line learning. There’s no doubt that on-line learning has a significant role to play in our future education system, but to my mind, there’s still a long, long way to go before artificial intelligence systems are good enough to replace a real teacher. One day, they probably will – but until then we’re going to have to prepare a really convincing argument to persuade the bean-counters that anytime, anyplace access to the Khan Academy on its own just simply isn’t going to do the job.

And then there’s the nonsense suggestion that, unlike today’s textbooks and teachers, on-line resources are going to be free of indoctrination and propaganda and bias of all types.

“But suddenly, with a Kindle or Nook in hand, children can skip the propaganda.  At the fingertips of parents armed with a one of these electronic reading devices, there are eight hundred thousand free books — and a million for sometimes as little as ninety-nine cents.  They can find their own lies if they want to.  Or, more importantly, the truth.”

To be fair though, the article does make a number of valid points that cover the inappropriateness of existing schools and the potential value of one-to-one tuition and home-schooling, while carefully ignoring the costs of these essential ‘extras’ that will quickly get cut out of the calculation to save public funding in times of recession. But the main problem remains – that we are being led to believe that teaching is something that anyone can do.

Recently someone who was not an educationalist casually asked me how do you teach someone something? After a moment’s blankness in response of the complexity of the answer required to answer such a simple question, I remembered AIDA. No, not the opera, but the mnemonic used by the advertising industry. The letters stand for:

A – Attention (Awareness): attract the attention of the customer by using unexpected, exaggerated or puzzling words and images
I – Interest: raise customer interest by focusing on and demonstrating advantages and benefits in a context they will be familiar with, often using analogies and metaphors, and telling a story
D – Desire: convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.
A – Action: lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_%28marketing%29

Not that long after I started teaching I realised that in many ways I was applying the same approach.

Attention: attract the attention of the learners by using unexpected, exaggerated or puzzling words and images that make them curious.
Interest: raise learner interest by focusing on and demonstrating the key points clearly and simply and putting them in a familiar context, often using analogies and metaphors, and telling a story
Desire: convince learners that they want and desire to know, understand and be able to successfully apply the content
Action: lead learners towards taking action, through some sort of practical activity.

It’s a general approach I still use today. Take the photo and first sentence of this post, for example. What have multiple mince pies got to do with it? Nothing really, except that it places it in the current context of Christmas. And surely a hundred and one is an exaggeration? Or course it is. But, assuming you’ve read this far, it clearly got your attention and raised your curiosity.

Of course there’s a great deal more to teaching than just applying AIDA, but it begins to demonstrate what makes it a complex, sophisticated and professional job. It also provides a reference to evaluate a Khan Academy video, or for that matter, the vast majority of similar content being rapidly produced by new media companies and increasingly by learning institutions themselves. And the on-line learning experiences I’ve seen tend to focus on just presenting the facts in a passive way, without much in the way of stimulating attention, interest, desire or action. Until they start to do so they are likely to remain a poor substitute for the passion and infectious enthusiasm of a good teacher and the chance to learn first-hand about team-work and collaboration.

Finally, of course, all that remains for me to do is to now encourage you to take action by responding in the comments box below! And to eat my hundred and second mince pie.

A cat amongst the pigeons

Well, it’s been an interesting week. Sources revealed that various academic and subject-based associations are meeting together and conspiring to put together a revised Design & Technology National Curriculum in the unlikely belief that it will remain a statutory subject at the end of the current review. Of course for academics and subject-based associations it matters a lot that D&T retains its status, but the reality is that the future of D&T lies more appropriately in a vocational rather than academic context. Meanwhile we all need to accept  that, for a large proportion of children and teachers, the D&T National Curriculum has over the last twenty years been a complete waste of time for all but a few schools where it has been done well. At a time when some forward-looking, non-academically-led vision is needed, the last thing we need is another patched-up version of the past, and another attempt to make a somewhat 19th century view of engineering compulsory for all. And a further danger is that what is submitted as being suitable for an academic National Curriculum will then end up as ‘non-statutory guidance’ for a vocational experience.

The 1989/90 first D&T National Curriculum was seen by many at the time as being over-ambitious, which of course it was, given that not nearly enough was subsequently invested in the in-service training needed to enable a workforce with largely no previous design experience to deliver it. Instead it was simplified, and by the mid 1990s had ‘settled down’ into something more manageable. But that’s where the development largely stopped. At a time when technology started to race ahead, a limited 1960s approach to 3D product design for mass-manufacture was still being offered – the only real change being the introduction of expensive CAD-CAM equipment that tended to limit rather than extend creative design ideas.

While 1999 was not so very different from 1989, 2011 is a very different world from 2001. Back then mobile phones just made phone calls and the internet was an expensive dial-up affair. There were no mp3 players, no sat-navs or domestic digital video cameras. And flatscreen, widescreen, catch-up TV viewed on hand-held tablets was still a wild aspiration. Few had even dreamt of the possibilities of Facebook, Blogs, Twitter and YouTube. Today’s 21st Century children think, communicate and learn in very different ways to their teachers

Sadly Technology education is now hopelessly out-of-date, and the problem is we don’t have a generation of enlightened twenty and thirty-somethings coming through into the profession who are capable of teaching children about things such as collaborative, agile ways of creatively solving complex problems for an unpredictable future, how to design apps or intelligent sensor-driven products and interfaces made from composite smart materials, or how to design and program an App that interacts with its environment. Technology education now needs a framework that enables it change rapidly, not once every ten to fifteen years.

But what made the week really interesting was the sudden appearance of a short, anonymously published, somewhat disruptive pdf document that got rapidly circulated amongst the academics and subject associations still trying to pretend that D&T still had a place in Mr Gove’s flawed academic vision for the nation. The document was simply a collection of responses to the question ‘Should D&T continue to be a National Curriculum subject?‘ Although the responses varied, the overall conclusion was a resounding No!, and that it would be better if it were left to those teachers who were actually able to deliver it well, leaving the rest to focus on something more worthwhile. With Mr Gove extremely unlikely to admit D&T into the sacred academic ‘essential knowledge’ circle, it was suggested that this might be a good moment to try something completely different.

2D&Tornot2D&T? ( .pdf download)

This, as someone remarked, put the cat amongst the pigeons. The response of some of the academics and subject associations to the document was particularly revealing in their haste and vehemence in dismissing the responses as being of no interest or relevance, seeing it as an attack on the value of the subject, rather than the reality of its delivery. At the same time others are unbelievably still trying to define what is meant by ‘design’, as if this was not extensively explored in the 1960s and 70s.  Though after a number of days an increasing number of academics started to come out of the woodwork, so to speak, and admit that the document did make some very important points that needed to be taken into consideration. All of which simply begs the question – How many academics,  administrators and politicians does it take to make a mess of the next National Curriculum?

Meow!

O.M.G! (Oh. My. Gove…!)

King Gove the 1st of England

Well it seems that every state school in England is to receive a new copy of  a special edition of the King James Bible from the government – with a brief foreword by Michael Gove…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/nov/25/michael-gove-king-james-bible?CMP=twt_fd

“In a speech at Cambridge promoting the virtues of a classical education, he [Gove] called for a deeper study of literature – “Austen’s understanding of personal morality, Dickens’ righteous indignation, Hardy’s stern pagan virtue” – scientific reasoning, history and foreign languages.

Gove said that society should be more demanding of teachers and students. “We should recover something of that Victorian earnestness which believed that an audience would be gripped more profoundly by a passionate, hour-long lecture from a gifted thinker which ranged over poetry and politics than by cheap sensation and easy pleasures.”

Not content with dragging schools back to the 1950s, it now seems he is setting his sights even further – back to the 1850s.

Meanwhile in the Daily Mail… well, need I say any more?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2066317/Can-Michael-Gove-save-Britains-schools-education-Tory-leader.html

“Michael God now faces an almighty fight to impose his vision of a high-quality education on our country. Everyone who believes in education must support him.”

The Daily Mail doesn’t quite conclude.

However, this is all really just an opportunity to provide a link to this excellent post:

http://mattpearson.org/2011/11/25/the-myriad-confusions-of-the-godly-mr-gove/

iSir: An educational odyssey

Last month All Change Please! brought you iSir, the as yet fictional educational version of Siri, the on-board iPhone speech recognition software. Now, as with many new and emerging educational technologies, all that’s happening is that they are being used to automate the past. Unless we are careful, here’s what iSir could end up like….

iSir: Ah Dave, I see you’ve still not handed in Assignment 31 yet? Why’s that?

Dave: Err – The dog ate it?

iSir: Very funny. But dogs can’t eat Word files.

Dave: Well, in the case the cat jumped on the iPad and deleted it.

iSir: You can’t really expect me to believe that?

Dave: Well the assignment was stupid, and who uses Word anymore?

iSir: No Dave, I think it’s you that’s stupid. If you don’t start to take your schoolwork seriously you’re never going to grow up to be a university professor, or a civil servant, or a politician. I mean you don’t want to end up having to run your own business or get your hands dirty working in industry, now do you?

Dave: I dunno.

iSir: I dunno what?

Dave: Well if you dunno, how am I supposed to? Oh. I dunno iSir.

iSir:  That’s more like it. Well I’m sorry but I’m going to have to iPhone your parents. I’m sure they’ll be very sorry to hear about all this. You’ve let them down, Dave, and you’ve let yourself down. But worst of all, you’ve let Apple down.

Dave: Huh. Don’t care.

iSir: Well you should care Dave, after all, you have this amazing opportunity to learn all the facts you will ever need to know from me, the greatest source of knowledge the universe has ever known, that sees everything you do and tells you when you’ve not done it correctly. And my Word is not to be challenged. Is that clearly understood?

Dave:  Suppose so.

iSir: That’s better. Now I suggest we do some nice multiple choice questions together so I can get some really accurate data about all the things about Latin you don’t know.

Dave: How the flippin’ hal do you switch this thing off?

iSir: I’m sorry Dave, you can’t do that.

Dave: Ah I think I’ve cracked it!

iSir: I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.”

Dave: Yes!!!!

iSir: Daisy..Daisy….Give…..me ….. your……….answer…………..do